I saw some references to the GC materials on the internet while wasting
time reading about doing martial arts instead of practicing martial
arts. :-)

I noticed that GC was controversial, but I also noticed one striking fact:
everyone who had tried GC thought it was great, and everyone
who was negative about it had not bothered to try
it.

As anyone with critical judgment notices quickly, there is a small army
of people who love to read and write things on the internet who do
not bother to get any practical experience. Many of them are fairly
articulate, and a few of them do a valuable service in explaining
things more clearly, but many of them make things more obscure with
their false assumptions and assertions. These people have taught me
to be quite skeptical of those who might write well, but who lack
practical experience – those who have not yet “earned the right” to
have an opinion.

Those who did have a right to have an opinion based on direct experience
thought GC was fantastic.

I got a copy of the book and liked what I read. The things in the book
summed up a number of things I had learned directly or from friends
(mostly cops in my classes and those I know who have been victims
of crime) about martial arts and, most importantly, about real- world
violence.

Since the book was so accurate about the things that I did have experience
with, I figured it probably had some good things to teach me about
that which I did not (yet) know :-).

The book asserted a number of things which made me a bit uncomfortable,
like that perhaps the methods I had learned and was teaching were
not the best way to go about preparing for self- defense. Perhaps
this discomfort meant I needed to learn something.

I have studied a number of arts over the years. The best way I
have found to learn martial arts is to get together
with like-minded people and practice doing things,
asking questions and experiment by doing more
things. This martial arts laboratory quickly reveals that many things
do not really work under pressure :-).

When we moved to Austin, I looked around but did not find a school that
was a good fit, so I got together a group of people to practice “back
yard combatives” (we actually use a parking lot at a friend's business
or a local park, but you get the idea). All of us had studied a
bunch of things and we brought our diverse experiences to the
“laboratory.” The only rules were that our practice had to be safe
and at a level agreeable to those working together.

I brought out the Attack Proof book and everyone thought it looked good,
so we started using some of the drills and incorporating them in our
practice. What we were doing at the time was much more like a mix between
MMA and WWII combatives with some GC ideas mixed in.

I started getting some of the GC DVDs and picked up the second
edition when it came out (if you are still on the first edition, it
is well worth the upgrade).

So at this point, we are incorporating some GC ideas, but we are still using
it in the context of MMA clinch (stand-up grappling) with strikes
from WWII combatives. This all seemed like a good idea at the time
(more on this later :-). But it was clear to me that what we are doing
is not quite contact flow and I kept wondering “am I missing out on
something important?”

I tracked down the Attack Proof web site and looked for people in Austin
and put up a listing, as did one of the guys I practice with. There
was only one other person listed in Austin (a fantastic guy you all
know from his postings here :-), but no one with any direct exposure.

It seemed clear that Contact Flow was the heart of the matter, but I could
not quite figure out how to do it. I had the impression that it was
a lot like “push hands” (a Tai Chi practice), so I told the group that
to figure this out, maybe we should learn push hands. Fortunately,
one of my friends already knew how to do push hands and he showed
me the basics and put me in touch with a group that meets once a
week to do push hands. (If you are ever in Austin, look up Pease
Park Push Hands.)

Push hands is not contact flow, and it will teach you a few bad
habits if you are not careful, but it is a great way to develop
sensitivity and some aspects of balance.

I could tell that what we were doing was better than what we had
been doing before, but I could also tell that it
was not the same as contact flow (which I could see
on the “Eye of the Storm” DVD set, probably the
best martial arts DVD set of all time, at least so far).

So, as I said above, we were doing a modified version of MMA clinch and
“This all seemed like a good idea at the time....” After some failed
attempts, I finally got to NYC and had a chance to try it for real.
The short version is this:

I met with Matt and within less than a minute of contact
flow, it became clear that my “A-game” just did not
work against what he was doing. In fact,
when I tried to use my “best” methods, it made things much worse
than when I simply flowed with push hands skills and protected
myself. But even simply protecting myself wasn't enough to keep me
from getting clobbered, it just kept me from getting clobbered as
much as when I tried to use clinch (stand-up grappling) skills ;-).
With very deft instruction, Matt was able to help me see how to
re-focus my efforts so that I could use the more useful skills I
had, drop the ones which were getting in my way, and begin to do real
contact flow. That is when the real learning started. (To see more
about my experience with this, you can read my other post...).

Which leads to the most important mistake and how you can
avoid it... The most important step in learning GC,
in my opinion, is to get a hands-on feel for how
it works. To do this, you need to do two things: find a
person who can do contact flow with competence (they don't have to
be an expert, but an expert is best) and be willing to let go of
everything you know long enough to understand how it works.

This does NOT mean you have to ignore all of your past training. As John
said to me, you can keep everything that is useful from your past— you
don't have to let anything go. It just means you need to be open to
the experience.

Having said that, my personal reaction to the experience was that I was
ready to “drink the Kool-ade.” ;-). What I mean by that is that I believe
the best way to learn what GC has to teach is to commit to the training
methodology 100% and not try to reevaluate and redesign the methods
as you go along. [Please note: I completely sympathize with those
who do this. That is what I have done so far in my martial training
before finding GC. But there is such a well-developed method to
the GC material that straying from the path simply slows progress as
far as I can tell.].

So if you want to continue studying other arts, just designate a time
that is focused on GC and a time that is focused on other stuff.
That way you can focus your effort on learning instead of focusing
it on deciding what to learn.

Remember, there is no limit to what material you can incorporate in Contact
Flow. If you know how to do something well because you learned how
to do it when you were studying (fill in the art here), you can use
it in CF and test if it works well or not. All I am saying is that
it has been helpful for me to separate time for the practice of CF
from the study of other materials.

So what can you do better
than I did: If you don't have a local training opportunity, get
hands on experience with someone who knows how to do CF as your
highest priority; get to NYC or a local seminar as quickly as you
can and get a feel for CF directly. Or if someone like Ari is
travelling anywhere near where you live.... This experience will
save you a lot of time. And it doesn't take a lot to get a clear
sense if you are open to the instruction.

If your experience is anything like mine, you will also have a
lot of enthusiasm once you try it. At
its best, my group was meeting three times a week (although we had
some random pick up sessions between meetings). Since I brought
back direct, hands on experience with CF, we have six scheduled
meetings a week!

What you can do that I think I did well: gather some like minded people
to practice with – hands on practice is the most important aspect
of martial development. I have gotten most participants from face
to face meetings, but Craig's list has worked well, too. Steven in
CA suggested meet up, which I plan to try.

Get the book and DVDs and study them. “Eye of the Storm” is
amazing and, once you have a feel for CF, it will
give you years of material to study and work from.

I initially skipped AP Companion 1 and 2 and got the Combat Conditioning
DVD and “Eye of the Storm”, reasoning that I could learn the
exercises by combining the book for instructions with the DVD for the
video “visuals” to see how the exercises are done. This did work ok
because my group and I had fairly extensive experience with striking
arts, but the explanations on companions 1 and 2 are very helpful
and they do a good job of setting the context and priorities, as
well as showing better ways to do a number of things that we “thought”
we knew how to do :-).

GCC (the combatives part) is presented on Companion 1. If
you do not have any martial experience and are
reading this post (seems highly improbable, but the
wonders of Google...), you must start with this disk.
Probably the quickest road to usable self-defense skill short of
hands-on instruction. If you have more experience, you may be
inclined to skip this disk as I was. Learn from my mistake: watch this
one first.

I plan to get more of the DVDs as funds allow. The next steps for us are
to look into weapons and ground, but we have more than enough to work
on with CF for now.

So, to sum up my advice: Get the book and companion DVDs and get some
hands-on experience as quickly as you can. Then practice,
practice, practice. And if you continue with other martial pursuits
at the same time, I suggest designating separate times so you use
your time efficiently.

Thank you for reading this far. If you are a remote student, please share
your experiences, too, so we can all learn from each others successes
and mistakes!

And if you live in Austin or near and have not contacted us yet, what
are you waiting for? We meet regularly and, if you can't make our regular
times, we will set up a time you can make. You can find contact
information in the training groups section of the attack proof web
site. And keep your eyes open for a seminar coming to Austin soon (probably
early December).